Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog

In my last post, I discussed a methodology that I could quickly put together an ancestors-only tree for my niece at MyHeritage.

I was able to get back to about 3rd great-grandparents on most of her lines. But it was her mother’s father’s mother’s side that started to get interesting.

My niece’s mother’s father’s mother was Emma Blanche (Smith) Graham (1883-1976). Now you can instantly spot that I’m in for a challenge with a maiden name of Smith. Smith of course is one of the most common surnames there are. So how can I ensure I get the correct John Smith out of two million John Smith’s?

Mayflower?

Following one of Emma’s ancestral lines I assembled at MyHeritage, it led me back through Smiths of Niagara Peninsula (Upper Canada) in the 1800’s to a Wilcox line in the 1700’s that led to Elizabeth Cooke (1641-1715) who was born in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Hmm. Plymouth was where the Mayflower arrived in 1520.

Her father was Jean John Cooke. One of the Record Hints that MyHeritage gave me was this one from WikiTree:

Jean John Cooke was born in Leiden in The Netherlands. Instantly, I recognized that as the city where the passengers on the Mayflower lived before their voyage in 1520. This year is the 500th anniversary of the Mayflower’s arrival! Might the picture WikiTree has for Jean John Cooke be the Mayflower? Could my niece be one of the 35 million Mayflower descendants?

I visited Leiden in 2014 for the Gaenovium Conference. What a beautiful city! And I had the pleasure of meeting and spending time with Tamura Jones, who just happens to be an expert with regards to Mayflower descendants. 

I sent off an email to Tamura asking him if this Jean John Cooke might have been on the Mayflower. Tamura confirmed for me that Francis Cooke was on the Mayflower along with his eldest son John who was a boy a the time. His wife Hester and other children came later.

This Jean John Cooke was the son who was on the Mayflower. Eureka! I can say now that it’s a fact that my niece is a Mayflower descendant, right?

Not so fast. Tamura then told me that he could not find the Wilcox line I supplied him in the lists of descendants he had. He said I should check that line.

So I went to our friend Google and came up with this: I2742: Daniel WILCOX (1631 - 2 Jul 1702) (ksu.edu). It’s from an obviously well researched and sourced genealogy of the Needham Family.

It indicates that Daniel Wilcox (1656 – bef 1730) was the son of Daniel Wilcox (1631 – 1702) and NOT Jean John Cooke’s daughter Elizabeth Cooke, but a previous wife, possibly: Susanna Thompson.

So Daniel Wilcox and his full brother Samuel Wilcox, are not descendants of Elizabeth Cooke and thus not descendants of John Cooke or Frances Cooke.

The extensive references at the bottom of the page talk about this and indicate that “there is no evidence that Elizabeth was the mother of his sons Daniel and Samuel”. 

I immediately scratched out the fiction of Elizabeth Cooke being an ancestor and replaced her with the fact of it being possibly Susanna Thompson.

So much for my niece being a Mayflower descendant, at least on that line.

Churchill?

We did get a not-so-small consolation prize out of it though. If you take a look at that Daniel Wilcox link I have above, at the bottom of the page in the references it states:

The Churchill Centre, "Mayflower Ancestry: For and Against"
http://www.winstonchurchill.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=50
"No genealogies have been more carefully prepared, or reach a higher standard than, the Mayflower Society genealogies. There is solid evidence that Daniel Wilcox married a first wife prior to his marriage to Elizabeth Cooke, granddaughter of Francis Cooke. There is no evidence that Elizabeth was the mother of his sons Daniel (Churchill’s ancestor) and Samuel. There is circumstantial evidence that she was not. In genealogy, absence of evidence means absence of conclusions."

Checking out Sir Winston Churchill’s ancestry, he does in-fact connect to Emma (Smith) Graham’s line.

Sir Winston was in fact a 5th cousin of my niece’s great-grandmother, making my niece a 5C3R (5th cousin, 3 times removed) to the British Prime Minister.

Just the Facts

The Needham Family site is a fantastic resource. You can see the numerous references at the bottom of each individual. It would take years to redo that work.

So I decided to go through his site and cross reference the ancestors I had collected and change any information I had to what he had. As I did that, Needham pointed me to another excellent study that was of Benjamin Wilcox by John Blythe Dobson, and I cross referenced and changed my information for my people from that study as well.

Of the 129 ancestors I had found for Emma (Smith) Graham, Needham had information on 84 of them, and Dobson had 32 of them.

I put the information in my spreadsheet so that I could quickly visualize and access the information at Needham and Dobson’s sites:

Notice the people in orange. They were fiction I obtained from other people’s genealogy.

Dobson stated:

"We know of no basis for the recent claim that she was a Sarah Hart or Hort, b 16 Apr 1684 at Dartmouth, daughter of Thoas Hart or Hort and Margaret. Not only is any such person absent from the town’s vital records, but …". Needham states "Some claim she was Sarah Hort, daughter of Thomas Hort. I have seen no definitive proof of this claim."

which negated the Hort name and Sarah’s parents and grandparents.

And Needham only gives Susanna Swift as “Susanna” with a 1612 birth date, not the 1622 that I had. So the Susanna that married Ralph Allen, likely wasn’t Susanna Swift. So scratch her parents. Needham also didn’t give a surname for Rachel Sherman, so I removed that as well.

There could, of course, be later scholarly research that updates what Dobson or Needham have found, but I’d like to see it with extensive references that can be followed before I’ll believe it.

Prime Minister?

Notice the Borden ancestors in the spreadsheet above. Needham pointed me a site with the Descendants of Richard Borden. That site pointed me to information about Sir Robert Borden (1854-1937), who happened to be the 8th Prime Minister of Canada.

So now I can assuredly add this Prime Minister as well to my niece’s cousin list. He would have been her 7C5R (7th cousin, 5 times removed).

Seaver?

One other connection I managed to make. While searching to verify the fiction or fact of a “Thomas Bloomfield” ancestor, I came across Amanuensis Monday - Post #286: 1684 Will of Thomas Bloomfield (1615-1686) of Woodbridge, N.J. by the incredible genealogist Randy Seaver on his Genea-Musings blog.

Randy’s genealogical work is also of the gold standard that I would 100% trust.

Searching his site for more information, I found his page Genea-Musings: Surname Saturday - BLOOMFIELD (England > colonial Massachusetts > New Jersey) and from that page I was able to tell that Thomas Bloomfield was Randy’s 10th great-grandfather.

He’s also my niece’s 10th great-grandfather. So that makes Randy and my niece 11th cousins.

Others?

I’m sure there will be more connections that will come up for my niece. Once a genealogy gets back this far to Colonial America and England, there’s much more to be found.

These first discoveries are exciting for me. My own genealogy by comparison heads back to Romania and Ukraine in the early 1900’s, so I’ve never really got to experience these sorts of family connections the way so many other genealogists do.

And I feel much better knowing that these connections are not fiction, but fact.

A few months ago, I decided it would be interesting to investigate my niece’s genealogy.

I entered information about her parents and grandparents into a new tree at MyHeritage and let MyHeritage’s Record Hints and Smart Matches go to work. It wasn’t too long before I had a couple of hundred people representing a lot of her relatives out to about 2nd cousins.

There were a few enticing hints on her mother’s father’s side that attracted me. I started following them and they’d each add another 30 relatives and take me back another generation. In very little time, MyHeritage had 80 source suggestions for me with over 1000 matches and every time I analyzed and confirmed a suggestion, the numbers would continue to grow.

I’m the type of person who likes a clean email in-box, as well as a clean MyHeritage hint list. I saw that I’d soon have thousands or even tens of thousands of people in my niece’s tree, and I really didn’t have the time to build that and resolve the multitude of hints that would result.

So I took a step back and thought about what I was doing. My niece had a few lines that were going back to Southern Ontario in the early 1800’s, and they got there from New Jersey where they were in the 1700’s and previously England. Now I’m in the realms of early America, and I realized these are genealogies that many genealogists connect to. A lot of research has already been done on these individuals and the same people are in the trees of many genealogists.

I had never had this problem with my own genealogy, since all my ancestors arrived in North America between 1900 and 1930 and I’ve never had to deal with early America and English roots. That really looks so interesting.

But I concluded it would be a waste of my time to redo all the research others have done. It’s all out there already. I just needed some way to connect to those people.

Pedigree-Only

I decided what was best was, after allowing inclusion of my niece’s relatives out to her 2nd cousins, would be to only add her direct ancestors to the tree.

At MyHeritage, that ended up being fairly simple to do. I checked the Smart Matches by person and found those that gave additional spouse or parent information for any of the direct ancestors.

Matthew Borden is one of my niece’s lines that traced back to England. I currently have that his wife’s name is Joan, but I don’t have her maiden name. Getting her maiden name, birth date and death date and place might lead to finding her parents.

MyHeritage has 78 Smart Matches for Matthew, and the Smart Match summary indicates that there is new spouse information.

Clicking on the "Review 78 matches” button reveals the 78 matches with other people’s trees at MyHeritage ordered first by the ones that provide the most additional information:

I check to make sure that my birth year and death year and places match, that the wife is listed as a partner, and that the son is listed as among the children. Since I am doing just the pedigree, I only have one child included.

Then I take a look at the partners, and see if the partners listed for the 78 matches all agree.  This is what I found:

• Joan Reeder (51 times)
• Joan Glover Reeder (9 times)
• Joan Mary Reeder (1 time)
• Joan (6 times)
• no partners listed (11 times), but 5 of these listed Joan Reeder as Matthew’s mother (presumably incorrect)

So they all seem to agree that the maiden name is likely Reeder. The Glover was sometimes in parenthesis, so I’m thinking it might the surname of her spouse of a previous or later marriage. With only 1 entry of a middle name of Mary, I’m not going to believe that until I get further evidence.

If I would have had conflicts here, then I would have gone off to our good friend Mr. Google and see if there’s something on her. I could look up “Matthew Borden” “Joan Reeder” and see what pops up. I’d be looking, not for a genealogy containing the two people, because I’ve already got plenty of those from MyHeritage’s Smart Matches, but for some scholarly work detailing the ancestry WITH SOURCES!!  The sources will show that it was detailed first-person research. Another family tree is NOT considered a source.

Here’s what Google gives:

The third link has nice information, specifically that source at the bottom:

So what I’ll now do now is Review the first Smart Match of Matthew Borden, confirm it, and mark the data in my tree I want to update. 

I may want to also update Matthew’s information if it’s better (e.g. birth and death date and place, occupation), and add his parent’s information if I don’t have it.

I was originally going to use Matthew’s parents as the example in this post, showing how conflicting information can be resolved, but this case is more complicated and his mother is still an unknown with several different people possible, so I chose to use Matthew’s wife instead.

The only people I will accept information for is Matthew, his wife, his parents and possibly his son Richard who is the direct line ancestor we are interested in. I will not select information about Matthew’s other children or siblings. By not selecting that information for inclusion, those other people will not be added to my niece’s MyHeritage tree and it will remain pedigree-only at this generational level.

I’ll then go down to the bottom of the Smart Match. I’ll be sure NOT to press the “Extract all info” button, but just click “Save to tree”.

Now I’ll go back to Matthew Borden’s Smart Matches. I’ll check the next few to see if they might have useful additional information. Once I’ve got most of the information I want, I’ll go up to the “More actions” dropdown and tell MyHeritage to confirm all the remaining matches.

However, I will not save any of the confirmed information to my tree. The confirmation simply makes them available in my profile of Matthew Borden, and removes them from my list of Smart Matches so that I can now concentrate on the next person.

I then simply continue this same procedure for each of the Smart Matches until I’ve exhausted them.

I’ll report on the results of this in an upcoming post.

Two weeks ago, I was interviewed on Zoom by Ditsa Keren for an article that was published on DNAweekly today.

DNAweekly publishes an interesting blog with a wide range of articles about consumer-based DNA tests that extend into their use by genealogists. They reach out and look for third-party software that might be of interest to DNA testers and found me and asked me if I was willing to be interviewed.

On their Blog page, they give an example of some of the recent DNAweekly blog posts:

The website’s primary focus is comparing, reviewing and rating DNA tests and include some FamilyTree based sites in their reviews. I currently count 58 different services in their review list.

They classify companies into these categories:  Ancestry, Family Tree, Health & Wellness, Diet and Nutrition, STD, Pets.  They give each company a rating from 1 to 10, provide for each a User Score of 1 to 5 stars, and then link each to a complete review of that product.

The product reviews are quite detailed and seem to be done very objectively. The company is obviously making money from affiliate links by you clicking and then purchasing the product, but that does not seem to be biasing their reviews in my opinion. They have some coupons available for some products towards the end of their review. Finally, at the bottom of their review, they allow you the user to write your own review on the product and give your star rating. The author of each review is shown with a brief biography.

All in all, a very nice review site for DNA, family tree and health testing services.